Natural Healing: Too Much Exercise Bad for Immune System

Runners’ immunity depressed by low-fat diets

March/April 2000
By Herb Companion Staff 
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Moderate exercise can enhance immunity, but don’t overdo it: A new study has found that high-intensity and endurance exercise may actually stress the immune system. Part of the reason for the depressed immune systems in the study’s participants—trained runners—was their severely fat-reduced diets, according to the study by University of Buffalo researchers, presented in May 1999 at the International Society for Exercise and Immunology Symposium held in Rome.

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Researchers found that running forty miles weekly on a 17 percent fat diet depresses the runners’ immunity. For endurance athletes, a higher-fat diet (45 percent total calories from fat) doesn’t stress the immune system and may lower free radicals, hormones, and compounds that promote inflammation. In runners consuming a higher-fat diet, natural killer cells used to fight infection more than doubled in one month.

Reference:
Venkatraman, J. T., and D. Pendergast. Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise, forthcoming Spring 2000.

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